"A review by The New York Times of thousands of court records and
internal agency documents showed that over the last 10 years almost 200
employees and contract workers of the Department of Homeland Security have taken nearly $15 million in bribes while being paid to protect the nation’s borders and enforce immigration laws.

The
Times’s findings most likely undercount the amount of bribes because in
many cases court records do not give a tally. The findings also do not
include gifts, trips or money stolen by Homeland Security employees.

Throughout
his campaign, President-elect Donald J. Trump said border security
would be one of his highest priorities. As he prepares to take office,he will find that many of the problems seem to come from within.

“It
does absolutely no good to talk about the building of walls or tougher
enforcement if you can’t secure the integrity of the immigration system,
when you have fraud and corruption with your own employees,” said an
internal affairs official at the Department of Homeland Security who
spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“Any
amount is bad, and one person alone can do a lot of damage,” said John
Roth, the inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security. “It
doesn’t have to be widespread.”

Law
enforcement experts say the bribing of border and immigration agents is
not surprising. As security along the border has tightened with the
addition of fences, drones and sensors, drug cartels and human smugglers
have found it increasingly more difficult to operate.

“So
it makes sense that cartels would target and try to corrupt border
interdiction agents,” said Fred Burton, chief security officer at
Stratfor, a global intelligence company, and a former deputy chief of
counterterrorism at the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service.
“It’s very similar to the tactics and tradecraft used by foreign
intelligence services during the Cold War.”

Customs
and Border Protection, which has had dozens of its officers arrested
and charged with bribery, said it had made additional changes to combat
corruption. Jeh Johnson, the secretary of Homeland Security, in 2014
gave authority to the agency’s internal affairs office to conduct
criminal investigations for the first time. And Mark Morgan, a former
F.B.I. agent who had investigated corruption on the border, was put in
charge of the Border Patrol.

“Polygraphs
have made it so we don’t hire people with significant problems,” said
R. Gil Kerlikowske, commissioner of the customs agency. “The bigger
problem is what happens to people who are already on board. These
changes address that.”

In
February, Johnny Acosta, a Customs and Border Protection officer in
Douglas, Ariz., was sentenced to eight years in prison for bribery and
drug smuggling. Mr. Acosta, who was arrested as he tried to flee to
Mexico, took more than $70,000 in bribes and helped smuggle over a ton
of marijuana into the United States.

In a plea agreement, Johnny
Acosta, a Customs and Border Protection officer, admitted to taking
bribes and participating in a scheme to smuggle marijuana across the
United States-Mexico border.Last
month, Eduardo Bazan, a Border Patrol agent in McAllen, Tex., was
arrested and accused of helping a drug trafficking organization smuggle
cocaine. According to court records, Mr. Bazan admitted to receiving
$8,000 for his help. José Cruz-López,
a Transportation Security Administration screener at Luis Muñoz Marín
International Airport in San Juan, P.R., was arrested around the same
time and accused of taking $215,000 in bribes to help smuggle drugs.

Corruption
investigators said the case of the former Border Patrol agent Ivhan
Herrera-Chiang illustratesthe damage a single compromised agent can
cause.In 2013, he was sentenced to 15 years for providing sensitive law
enforcement information to drug cartels.

Ivhan Herrera-Chiang, a
former Border Patrol agent who is known as La Mujer, was accused in a
criminal complaint of passing information about a confidential informant
to a member of a drug cartel who planned to have the informant killed.Mr.
Herrera-Chiang also entered law enforcement databases on his work
computer to run drug seizure checks and even provided information on
confidential informants in Mexico. That information included one
informant whom federal law enforcement officers were able to locate
before he could be killed, court records said. Mr. Herrera-Chiang
admitted to receiving about $4,500 in bribes for his efforts, but his
co-conspirator put the amount between $60,000 and $70,000.

Convicted
former border and immigration agents give different reasons for taking
bribes, from financial troubles to drug use. But for many, it was simple
greed.

Records
show that Border Patrol officers and customs agents, who protect more
than 7,000 miles of the border and deal most directly with drug cartels
and smugglers, have taken the most in bribes, about $11 million.

But
the issue of bribery extends well beyond front-line agents at the
border. Department of Homeland Security employees who enforce
immigration and customs laws and provide citizenship benefits and
aviation security have also been arrested or indicted on and convicted
of charges of taking bribes.

Last month, Daniel Espejo Amos,
a former immigration service officer at the United States Citizenship
and Immigration Services in Los Angeles, pleaded guilty to taking
$53,000 in bribes from immigration lawyers on behalf of 60 immigrants
who were not eligible to become naturalized citizens of the United
States. Mr. Amos certified that the immigrants met the requirements for
citizenship, even though one person’s English-language skills were so
poor that copies of test answers were given to him so he could memorize
them for a naturalization interview.

Transportation
security officers and screeners with access to secure areas of airports
that could be used to smuggle weapons and even carry bombs onto planes
have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes as well, records
show.

Mr.
Roth, the inspector general, said rooting out corrupt employees is a
top priority for his office, which gets 300 to 400 cases a year alleging
corruption. The office takes about 100 of the cases and sends the rest
to internal affairs offices at ICE, Customs and Border Protection, the
T.S.A. and Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The
Border Corruption Task Force, which is directed by the F.B.I. and
includes agencies from the Department of Homeland Security as well as
the Drug Enforcement Administration, has also pursued dozens of
corruption and bribery cases that have ended in convictions.

Instead, the report said, the
agency based its investigations on reporting from other employees,
other government agencies or the public, by which time the corruption
could have festered for decades.

The
agency also needed to more than double the number of internal affairs
criminal investigators to 550 from about 200, the report said. It said
the agency’s 2017 budget calls for an increase of only 30 investigators.

James
Tomsheck, the former head of internal affairs at Customs and Border
Protection, said many of the problems the agency is facing with corrupt
agents had to do with inadequate prehiring screening programs.

From his dramatic and disastrous change of US policy on Israel to his
executive order restricting 1.65 million acres of land from development
despite local objections, Obama is trying to make it impossible for
Donald Trump and a GOP-controlled Congress to govern.

Even Thursday’s announcement of wide-ranging sanctions against Russia
presents Trump with a foreign-policy crisis immediately upon taking
office.

By contrast, many of Obama’s predecessors have stood back in their
final days in office and refrained from any dramatic shifts, in
deference to the agenda of the man voters sent to succeed them.

He believes this not just because he’s an effective campaigner, but
because he thinks his “vision” and policies continue to be backed by “a
majority of the American people.”

But Obama, like many Democrats, fails to understand what happened in
the election: Voters were calling for real change from the status quo —
from his policies. Indeed, before the vote, he himself said it was a
referendum on him and his policies.

Memo to the president: You lost.

Whether it was the lackluster economy, ObamaCare, trade, the sweeping
failure of his foreign policy or illegal immigration, voters sought
something very different.

The results, as many have since come to realize, is that the
Democratic Party now caters to a hard-left, elite core located on the
two coasts — and has abandoned the working-class Americans in the
heartland it so loudly claims to champion.

Which is why Democrats have also been losing seats, especially at the
state level. Voters are fed up with Democratic failures — to the point
where they were willing to take a chance on an untested novice like
Trump.

Obama’s failure to follow tradition and respect votersis par for the
course. He spent much of his tenure pushing the bounds and overstepping
his constitutional authority — through regulatory edicts and executive
actions. So his latest power grab should come as no surprise.

But it’s one thing for Obama to have delusions about the popularity
of his agenda. It’s quite another to try to preserve a discredited
legacy by handcuffing America’s next democratically elected president."

In
fact, had those people who agreed that Mr. Trump lacked “a sense of
decency” voted for Mrs. Clinton, she would have been elected the next
president.

Mrs.
Clinton and Mr. Trump equally won over party loyalists. Yet about one
in five voters did not have a favorable view of either candidate. These
voters overwhelmingly backed Mr. Trump. Exit polls demonstrated that if voters who disapproved of both candidates had divided evenly between them, Mrs. Clinton would have won.

Several weeks before the election, a Quinnipiac University poll
found that 51 percent of white working-class voters did not believe
that Mr. Trump had a “sense of decency” and ranked Mrs. Clinton slightly
higher on that quality.

But
they were not voting on decency. Indeed, one-fifth of voters — more
than 25 million Americans — said they “somewhat” disapproved of Mr.
Trump’s treatment of women. Mr. Trump won three-quarters of these
voters, despite their disapprobation.

Bluntly
put, much of the white working class decided that Mr. Trump could be a
jerk. Absent any other champion, they supported the jerk they thought
was more on their side — that is, on the issues that most concerned
them.

And
anti-immigrant blowback, for instance, was not what unified them. Mr.
Trump proposed expelling illegal immigrants yet more of his voters, by a
50 percent to 45 percent margin, said illegal immigrants working here
should be offered a chance to apply for legal status rather than be
deported.

Mr. Obama’s support among these whites was at its peak in 2008after the stock market crash. At the depths of the Great Recession that followed, blue-collar white men experienced the most job losses.

Their support began hemorrhaging
after Mr. Obama chose early in his presidency — when congressional
Democrats could have overcome Republican obstruction — to fight for
health care reform instead of a “new New Deal.”

This argument does not ignore bigotry. Racism appeared more concentrated among Trump voters. One [Reuters] poll
found that four in 10 Trump supporters said blacks were more “lazy”
than whites, compared with one-quarter of Clinton or John Kasich
supporters.

Democrats
need only recall Mr. Clinton to understand how voters can support
someone in spite of his faults. Mr. Clinton won re-election in 1996
despite a majority, including about a third of liberal voters, saying he
was not honest.His approval rating reached the highest point
of his presidency during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. It wasn’t that
Democrats and independents endorsed Mr. Clinton’s behavior. They opposed
Republicans more.

Next, Obama presided over the violent overthrow of the constitutional
government in the Ukraine and the installation of an American puppet
regime there. When Crimea then voted to rejoin Russia, Obama imposed
sanctions on the Russian Federation. These moves may seem like they were
designed to hurt Russia, but let’s look at the results instead of the
intentions. First, Russia regained control of an important, strategic
region. Second, the sanctions and the countersanctions allowed Russia to
concentrate on import replacement, building up the domestic economy.
This was especially impressive in agriculture, and Russia now earns more
export revenue from foodstuffs than from weapons. Third, the severing
of economic ties with the Ukraine allowed Russia to eliminate a major
economic competitor. Fourth, over a million Ukrainians decided to move
to Russia, either temporarily or permanently, giving Russia a major
demographic boost and giving it access to a pool of Russian-speaking
skilled labor. (Most Ukrainians are barely distinguishable from the
general Russian population.) Fifth, whereas before the Ukraine was in a
position to extort concessions from Russia by playing games with the
natural gas pipelines that lead from Russia to the European Union, now
Russia’s hands have been untied, resulting in new pipeline deals with
Turkey and Germany. In effect, Russia reaped all the benefits from the
Ukrainian stalemate, while the US gained an unsavory, embarrassing
dependent.

There have been other achievements as well. By constantly talking up the
nonexistent “Russian threat” and scaremongering about “Russian
aggression” and “Russian invasion” (of which no evidence existed), and
by holding futile military exercises in Eastern Europe and especially in
the geopolitically irrelevant Baltics, Obama managed to deprive NATO of
any residual legitimacy it once might have had, turning it into a sad
joke.

But perhaps Obama’s most significant service on behalf of the Russian
nation was in throwing the election to Donald Trump. This he did by
throwing his support behind the ridiculously inept and corrupt Hillary
Clinton. She outspent Trump by a factor of two, but apparently no amount
of money could buy her the presidency. As a result of Obama’s steadfast
efforts, the US will now have a Russia-friendly president who is eager
to make deals with Russia, but will have to do so from a significantly
weakened negotiating position.

As I have been arguing for the last decade, it is a foregone conclusion
that the United States is going to slide from its position of global
dominance. But it was certainly helpful to have Obama grease the skids,
and now it’s up to Donald Trump to finish the job. And since Obama’s
contribution was especially helpful to Russia, I propose that he be
awarded the Russian Federation’s Order of Friendship, to go with his
Nobel Peace Prize."........among comments...........

With President Obama in his
final year, discussions have been swirling about an attempt to bring a
security council resolution on the terms of an eventual agreement
between Israel and Palestine.

Let me be clear: An agreement imposed by
the UN would be a total and complete disaster. The United States must
oppose this resolution and use the power of our veto. Why? Because
that's not how you make a deal.

Deals are made when parties come
to the table and negotiate. Each side must give up something it values
in exchange for something it requires. A deal that imposes conditions on
Israel and the Palestinian Authority will do nothing to bring peace. It
will only further delegitimize Israel and it would reward Palestinian
terrorism, because every day they are stabbing Israelis – and even
Americans.

Just last week, American Taylor Allen Force, a West
Point grad who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was murdered in the
street by a knife-wielding Palestinian. You don't reward that behavior,
you confront it!

It's not up the United Nations to impose a
solution. The parties must negotiate a resolution themselves. The United
States can be useful as a facilitator of negotiations, but no one
should be telling Israel it must abide by some agreement made by others
thousands of miles away that don't even really know what's happening. When
I'm president, believe me, I will veto any attempt by the UN to impose
its will on the Jewish state....

We know Israel is willing to
deal. Israel has been trying to sit down at the negotiating table,
without pre-conditions, for years. You had Camp David in 2000, where
Prime Minister Barak made an incredible offer – maybe even too generous.
Arafat rejected it.

In 2008, Prime Minister Olmert made an
equally generous offer.

The Palestinian Authority rejected it. Then John
Kerry tried to come up with a framework and Abbas didn't even respond,
not even to the Secretary of State of the United States of America!

When
I become President, the days of treating Israel like a second-class
citizen will end on Day One. I will meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu
immediately. I have known him for many years and we will be able to work
closely together to help bring stability and peace to Israel and to the
entire region.

Meanwhile, every single day, you have rampant
incitement and children being taught to hate Israel and hate the Jews.
When you live in a society where the firefighters are the hero’s, little
kids want to be firefighters.

When you live in a society where
athletes and movie stars are heroes, little kids want to be athletes and
movie stars. In Palestinian society, the heroes are those who murder
Jews - we can't let this continue. You cannot achieve peace if
terrorists are treated as martyrs. Glorifying terrorists is a tremendous
barrier to peace. In Palestinian textbooks and mosques, you’ve
got a culture of hatred that has been fermenting there for years, and if
we want to achieve peace, they’ve got to end this indoctrination of
hatred.

There is no moral equivalency. Israel does not name public
squares after terrorists. Israel does not pay its children to stab
random Palestinians.

You see, what President Obama gets wrong
about deal making is that he constantly applies pressure to our friends
and rewards our enemies. That pattern, practiced by the President and
his administration, including former Secretary of State, Hillary
Clinton, has repeated itself over and over and has done nothing but
embolden those who hate America. We saw that with releasing $150 billion
to Iran in the hope that they would magically join the world community -
It's the same with Israel and Palestine.

President Obama thinks
that applying pressure to Israel will force the issue, but it's
precisely the opposite. Already, half the population of Palestine has
been taken over by the Palestinian ISIS in Hamas, and the other half
refuses to confront the first half, so it’s a very difficult situation
but when the United States stands with Israel, the chances of peace
actually rise. That's what will happen when I’m president.

The Palestinians must come to the table knowing that the
bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable. They must come
to the table willing and able to stop the terror being committed on a
daily basis against Israel and they must come to the table willing to
accept that Israel is a Jewish State and it will forever exist as a
Jewish State."... .....................

Comment: Why is the US even a
member of a group of haters, parasites, terrorists, and their lazy
relatives? Because the US political class likes it this way. The US
political class thinks it's fine to force chump US taxpayers to pay the
majority of bills for a massive, unaccountable money laundering
operation. UN personnel can put all US taxpayer dollars into personal
bank accounts and suffer no consequences.

León Rodríguez, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services, and Simon Henshaw, deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau
Of Population, Refugees, and Migration, were adamant that refugees
allowed entry pose no threat to Americans."...

None of this was of any concern at all to the Democrats on the
committee, who seemed hell-bent on ignoring the very real questions
raised about national security and turning the hearing into a
excoriation of supposed Republican "fear and hate."

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.)...produced two giant copies of now-famous photos of
refugee children: Alan Kurdi, who drowned crossing the Mediterranean,
and Omran Daqneesh. Of course, Kurdi drowned because of the actions of
his father — a people-smuggler....

"In the end the Russian people chose--and chose decisively--to reject
the past. Voting in the final round of the presidential election last
week, they preferred Boris Yeltsin to his Communist rival Gennadi
Zyuganov by a margin of 13 percentage points. He is far from the ideal
democrat or reformer, and his lieutenants Victor Chernomyrdin and
Alexander Lebed are already squabbling over power, but Yeltsin is
arguably the best hope Russia has for moving toward pluralism and an
open economy. By re-electing him, the Russians defied predictions that
they might willingly resubmit themselves to communist rule. The outcome was by no means"...(log in required) (via discussion on WBAI)

"I don't
have candidates generally who are as responsive as Boris Yeltsin," said
George Gorton, who worked for Wilson in 1994 and later ran Wilson's
abortive bid for the GOP nomination. "Certainly not Pete Wilson."

Hired
in February through a San Francisco firm with connections in Moscow,
Gorton said that the team members never met Yeltsin. Instead, they sent
their detailed, unsigned memos to his daughter. "We were told that we
were formally retained as advisors to the Yeltsin family."

Although
the Americans spoke no Russian and worked through translators, they
began secretly laying out an American-style campaign to counter the
public sentiment running against Yeltsin. When they started,
Yeltsin's approval rating was about 6%, and, as they told Time magazine,
Josef Stalin had a higher positive rating in their polls. Yet last
week, Yeltsin defeated Communist candidate Gennady A. Zyuganov by more
than 13 percentage points.*In an interview here Monday,
Gorton said that he and his colleagues quickly realized that Yeltsin did
not trust his campaign advisors to help him win reelection and placed
more value on the advice of his daughter.

"However, she didn't
know anything," Gorton said. "She's very bright, very articulate, very
strong-willed, but she didn't have the first idea about campaigning, not
even the ideas that a child here would have."

The Americans were
brought in by a circuitous route. Felix Braynin of San Francisco, a
Soviet immigrant who is now a wealthy consultant to American businesses
working in Russia, began helping the Yeltsin campaign last year.

After
he asked about American advisors who could help, San Francisco lawyer
Fred Lowell suggested Gorton and Joe Shumate, an expert on political
polling, and Richard Dresner, a political strategist who has helped not
only Wilson but President Clinton in his earlier campaigns for governor
of Arkansas.

The Americans will not say how much they were paid,
although their fee has been estimated at about $250,000. They were told
that their involvement had to be treated like a state secret because of
fears that the Communists would use their presence to try to foment
anti-Western sentiment among voters.

"What you have to understand is that
this hotel is a minimum-security prison masquerading as a five-star
hotel," said Steven Moore, a 28-year-old political consultant who joined
in the effort. The team is still secretive about some of its
Russian business. Dresner prefers to stay mum about whether he was in
touch with his old colleague Dick Morris,now Clinton's chief campaign
advisor. Citing certain "agreements" that they refuse to explain,
Dresner and Gorton acknowledge only that information about their work
was made available to the Clinton White House.

*The
American advisors also worked with the Russians on such details as
replacing a poster of a scowling Yeltsin with a smiling version. They
suggested that some negative ads needed to be more subtle--persuading
the Yeltsin campaign to pull one poster that showed a hammer and sickle
made of cockroaches.

Some of Yeltsin's Russian advisors felt
strongly that he could not criticize communism, especially since
Communists had done so well in parliamentary elections in December and
their leader, Zyuganov, was doing so well in the polls.

But
Yeltsin followed the American advice until the last few days before the
first round of balloting June 16, Gorton said. At that point, however,
the Russian advisors canceled the anti-Communist ads. About the same
time, Dresner said, Yeltsin's campaign polls showed a flattening out.

But mostly, Yeltsin took their advice, the Americans said.

Perhaps
the most troubling moment in their adventure came when it appeared some
of Yeltsin's advisors in the Kremlin were trying to convince him to
cancel the election. At one point, the Americans believed that a Moscow
pollster was handing out false numbers showing that Yeltsin could not
possibly win.

"It came to the point that we wrote a memo I would
never have written anywhere else. We said: 'This campaign is in the
bank. It's over. It's finished,' " Gorton said, meaning that Yeltsin had
won."

Before entering Germany, he served four years for arson in Italy and faced a jail sentence in absentia in Tunisia.

The failed asylum seeker is now the subject of a manhunt across Europe.

An
arrest warrant was issued after his residence permit was found in the
cab of the lorry that left a trail of carnage at a Christmas market near
Berlin's most famous shopping street, the Kurfuerstendamm, on Monday
evening.

The German authorities warn he could be armed and
dangerous and are offering a reward of up to €100,000 (£84,000;
$104,000) for information leading to his arrest.

Reports suggest he may have been injured in a struggle with the
lorry driver, found murdered in the cab. The attack claimed 12 lives in
all....

Six aliases

German judicial
sources say the suspect, who reportedly entered Germany last year,was
monitored in Berlin between March and September on suspicion of planning
a robbery to pay for automatic weapons for use in an attack.

Ralf Jaeger, the
interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, confirmed that Anis Amri
had, more recently, attracted the attention of counter-terrorism police.

"Security agencies exchanged their findings and information about
this person with the Joint Counter-Terrorism Centre in November 2016,"the minister said.

Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reports that the
suspect moved within the circle of an Islamist preacher, Ahmad
Abdelazziz A, known as Abu Walaa, who was arrested in November.A police notice lists six different aliasesused by Anis Amri, who at
times tried to pass himself off as an Egyptian or Lebanese.

The new suspect apparently arrived in Germany in July 2015 and lived
in three German regions since February, mostly in Berlin, said Ralf
Jaeger, the interior minister of western North Rhine-Westphalia state.

Jaeger
told reporters on Wednesday that state police had launched proceedings
against the man on suspicion that he was preparing a serious crime. He
said “security agencies exchanged information about this person in the
joint counter-terrorism center, the last time in November.”

Anis
Amri's father and security sources told a Tunisian radio station that
after leaving Tunisia about seven years ago, he had served four years in
an Italian prison over a fire at a school

He was also sentenced to five years in prison in Tunisia in absentia, reportedly for aggravated theft with violence

An
earlier suspect, a Pakistani asylum seeker, was freed from German
custody on Tuesday, with officials saying there was no evidence to link
him to the attack.

'Struggle with driver'

Some
49 people were also injured when the lorry was driven into crowds at
the Breitscheidplatz Christmas market. So-called Islamic State said one
of its militants carried out the attack but offered no evidence.

Polish citizen Lukasz Urban was found dead on the passenger seat with gunshot and stab wounds.

Investigators believe the lorry was hijacked on Monday afternoon as
it stood in an industrial zone in north-western Berlin, Germany's Bild
tabloid reports.

Mr Urban had stopped there after the delivery of Italian steel beams he was carrying was postponed until Tuesday.

GPS
data from the vehicle reportedly shows it made small movements "as if
someone was learning how to drive it" before leaving for the city at
19:40 (18:40 GMT), heading for the Christmas market near the
Kurfuerstendamm, Berlin's main shopping street....

"I don't recognise his face," Andi from Albania told me as I
showed him a picture of the Berlin suspect. "But we've been talking
about this attack with other refugees," he added, "and about how this
man had jihadist contacts around here. Maybe he did. It's horrible
around here. We hate it but no one here knew much about him."

There
is a swastika graffiti sign on the corridor wall, evidence of
anti-migrant sentiment, which migrants say was done by locals two months
ago.

The site's night manager, who did not want to be
identified, told me he had recognised Amri "straightaway" because "We're
a small place. I know everyone who stays here." Staff said Amri had
"disappeared" after "a brief stay".

Jihadist group Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda have both called for
the use of vehicles as weapons and the attack in Nice in July was the
clearest sign of the terrible damage a lorry could wreak when 86 people
were killed.

In
that case, the driver may have been inspired by IS jihadists but the
extent of direct contact seems to have been limited. Vetting every lorry
driver is not a solution especially, as seems to have been the case in
Berlin, a vehicle was hijacked just hours before it was used.

The challenges in preventing such low-tech attacks are complex.

A decade ago those working with al-Qaeda tended to plan more complex attacks involving explosives.

This often required international travel
and training as well as communication and such plots took time to
develop. This all provided potential opportunities for intelligence
agencies to learn about the plans and interdict them.

Protecting crowds from lone jihadists

If
an individual is inspired by IS but not in touch with them and acts
either alone or in a small cell, then it can be harder to spot them. By
the time they hijack a lorry, there may be few chances to find them.

Advice
is published by the National Counter Terrorism Security Office to those
looking after security at buildings, pubs, bars and visitor attractions
on how to protect themselves.

Much of that historically has been
about protecting against car bombs or what is called "a marauding
firearms attack" - the kind of incident seen first in Mumbai and more
recently in Paris.

The concern over car bombs has led to
investment in bollards, obstacles and chicanes - sometimes integrated
into local architecture rather than overtly visible - which would make
it harder for a vehicle to ram a building at speed.

There is also increased surveillance at public events and liaison by organisers with police to prepare.

Markets
are still hard to protect, partly because they tend to be based in open
squares and streets but are also temporary in nature - making it less
likely that there will be investment in heavy, permanent security,
although temporary barriers can still be used.

British
police forces say security plans were already in place for markets in
the UK and these will be reviewed and in some cases adjusted, with
Greater Manchester Police increasing their presence.

"More bollards and troops on the streets is absolutely not the answer
to this threat," Richard Walton, who was in charge of counter-terrorism
at the Metropolitan Police from 2011 until the start of 2016, told the
BBC.

"You have to build your intelligence capability more. You
have to encourage people to come forward and in particular you have to
encourage the Muslim community to come forward and trust the agencies
and report information and concerns they have got".

There may be questions, though, as to whether enough was done in Berlin given that this threat was known about.

The
US state department issued a warning in late November telling American
citizens to exercise caution at "holiday festivals, events and outdoor
markets".

Increased security was put in place at some Christmas
markets, such as the more famous one at Strasbourg, with checks on
people and restrictions on vehicle movements.

But one risk is
that if all markets are not secured to the same standard, it might
simply divert an attacker to a less well-defended target.